


Immutable

by thedevilchicken



Category: Pitch Black (2000)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-18 23:04:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5946697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wasn’t going to change him. He promised himself that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Immutable

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Katarik](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katarik/gifts).



She wasn’t going to change him. He promised himself that. 

It was tempting in the start to just fuck up all three of them then eject them into space, have done with it and disappear like all the Hunter-Gratzner's passengers had died down there and not just the vast majority. Riddick spent some real quality time considering that option as he sat at the stick of their crappy skiff, his feet up on the dash, pretending to sleep. He didn't sleep. The goggles helped. While they were on, no one could tell if his eyes were open or closed. 

By the time they reached the first habitable world, he guessed the sun had pretty much set on that plan because shit, it wasn’t like a planetside bloodbath wouldn’t have sparked off the whole chase again, _again_. They'd spent three miserable fucking weeks living on top of each other in that cramped-ass compartment, eating shitty MREs like freeze-dried baby food, drinking recycled water they were all pretty sure still tasted faintly of piss. No showers. Weak-ass air scrubbers. He was genuinely surprised he hadn’t committed three counts of murder in those three miserable weeks, but then they landed. Imam said it must have been God’s will, so he’d stay out there in the ass-end of space, preach and teach and do whatever the fuck it was he'd planned to do in New Mecca. Riddick didn’t try to dissuade him. Fry and Jack did, but it didn’t work. Riddick couldn't say he was heartbroken.

They restocked, took on fresh water, traded some of the crap they’d found stowed on board for clean clothes and a second-hand nav unit that wasn't full of charts from before time began like the skiff's was. Two days after that and they said their goodbyes to Imam in the spaceport. The three of them got back underway, no goddamn idea where they were headed 'cause every suggestion they had took them too damn close to a slam. He could break out again, sure, but it wasn't like he liked to do it. His raison d'être wasn't fucking prison breaks.

Four weeks to the next colony. Jack was a pretty cute kid but Riddick didn’t feel much like he needed a pet and sitting there, day after day, night after night, listening to her, him, who gave a fuck which except maybe Jack did and Fry glared when he got it wrong like righteous fucking fury, started to grate. Jack wanted to see his eyeshine, wanted him to tell the story. Jack wanted to talk about the surgery, wanted to know what it'd felt like to get it done, if it hurt, if it took long to heal. Jack wanted to be his friend but he’d killed the last friend he’d had and he’d never felt remorse for it. He wondered if he’d feel remorse if he slit Jack’s throat from ear to ear. He wasn't sure when he decided not to, or why, except he guessed decomposing corpses didn't smell a whole lot better in space than they did anywhere else.

And in the middle of all, there was Fry. She was watching him. She was always there. It amused him in the start but then it got fucking irritating; in the end, he couldn’t stand her eyes on him. He'd already been judged by the system, he didn't need her disapproval, too.

Just a week to the next planet after that and by then Riddick had started to comprehend the many virtues of cryosleep; maybe he’d have been awake, sure, but at least Jack would’ve shut the fuck up and maybe Fry would’ve stopped looking at him like he’d done something wrong, at least something more wrong than usual. He wasn’t going to feel guilty for almost leaving her there on that planet. She couldn’t make him feel guilty, she did _not_ have that power. She couldn’t for damn sure when he lost the two of them in the street one day, slipped away in the crowd and left. He was better off alone. They’d be better off without him, once the mercs started to come, and fuck if they didn't always come. He couldn't blame them, exactly; the bounty was high enough he'd've turned himself in for it if he could've. He could've lived like a king on the proceeds.

It was eight months later when she found him, in a shitty bar in a shitty town on a shitty planet at the dusty, downtrodden edge of the universe. He kicked out a chair as she walked on over. Anywhere else in the universe the scum clientele would've turned their heads to gawk at her, but out there in the back of beyond, out there where no one asked fro ID, they knew to keep their business to themselves and look the other way, no questions asked, no questions answered. She sat down. They ordered drinks and drank them in silence. 

“I left Jack with Imam,” she said, in the end, though he hadn’t asked and he hadn’t planned to, either. “Then I came looking for you.” 

“Why’d you do that?” he asked, 'cause it seemed he was genuinely curious about that, at least. 

She shrugged, tossed back what was left of her first glass as she eyed him over the table. “We have unfinished business,” she said, and it was right then that he knew, when she looked at him the way she did, like she was eating him a-fucking-live, and it was the biggest thrill he'd had in months. She hadn't been trying to make him feel guilty; she'd been trying to make _herself_ feel guilty for the things she wanted to do, with him, to him, maybe even for him, and it turned out she'd failed or she'd backed down or she'd just reconciled herself to it. He laughed and he ordered them both another round, and then another after that. She let him. He was pretty sure the way it was all headed. 

They screwed all night after the sixth round, once they'd walked back in the dark to his shitty rented room off a seedy back alley, went at it till the neighbors complained and beat their damn fists on the door but all that did was make them both laugh and yell amused profanities. They did it in the dark so he could take his goggles off to watch her, but then she turned on the lights halfway through and fucking blinded him, rode him, cursed at him, clutched his hands to her breasts while all he could see of her through heavy-lidded eyes was a burning dance of light. 

They slept together after, or she slept, her skin still hot, still sweaty, smooth and pale and right there under his hands, so fucking trusting that she wouldn't wake up dead. She wasn’t the first one who’d come for him there but she was the only one he’d been pleased to see and she'd looked at him like she'd know that. He was impressed she’d got to him. And just for a second he hated how he couldn’t just put a knife in her neck, in her back, in her thigh, and watch her bleed her life away. He got over it. In the end, he let himself sleep, too.

In the morning, at breakfast in the bar, over coffee that tasted like it’d been ground from fucking mud, she slapped her creds down on the table, pushed the badge closer to him, made him shake his head. 

“You’re a merc,” he said. “You're a bounty hunter. Damn, I didn’t see that coming.”

She shrugged, tucked her blond hair behind her ears as she levelled a look at him. “It seemed like the next logical step,” she said, and when she leaned back in her seat he could see the gun at her hip. It suited her somehow. Hell, in her own special way she'd killed almost as many people as he had. 

“I ain’t going back to slam,” he said.

“I didn’t ask you to.” She leaned in closer, on her forearms on the table, fingers spread wide over the splintered wood. “I’ve got a ship. I came _for_ you, not to _take_ you.”

He laughed, but even right in the moment he knew it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. He left with her. One way or another, he'd been going to leave with her since she'd walked into that bar. Maybe he hadn't missed her, but he'd come damn close to it sometimes.

They made a good team, it turned out. It was all against his better judgement but there he was, assistant to a mercenary, a gun-toting gal with a chip on her shoulder the size of goddamn Slam City. Their first score was marked up _dead or alive_ and she took the guy dead, coolly, calmly, a shot straight through the head with a steady hand that only shook later, after. He admired her conviction; it'd been that guy with his face on all the notices or her, his life or hers and she’d choose hers each and every time, he knew that, but then she sent all the cash back to Imam and Jack. So maybe in the end it wasn't _every time_ after all. Maybe there were people in the universe she'd risk her pretty neck for. 

Their second score, Riddick put a swift little nick right in their mark’s carotid, bled the guy out; Fry bitched about it for a week or more because that _wasn’t_ life or death, not really. She was fucking absurd. She was a killer with a conscience. She couldn’t make him be one, too, because he wouldn't fucking let her. 

Imam built a school with the money they sent; Jack learned in it and one day decided he’d train to be a doctor 'cause it seemed he had an aptitude for it. They needed doctors there and years later, _years_ later, when the colony was finally thriving, Jack still stitched Riddick up when they came in calling there for help. He kept the makeshift goggles he'd worn back there on the planet before the dark in a drawer in his desk in his office where Riddick looked at them with a smile sometimes though that made Jack blush, and he entered Riddick’s DNA in the file for a drifter whose death he didn’t report. He made Richard B Riddick disappear without a trace. Riddick thanked him, ruffled his short hair like he was still a kid somehow, but it was all kinda anticlimactic. He didn’t want to go away. He liked his name. He owned his history.

“Don’t think I’ll be calling you Abraham,” Fry said with a smirk when she saw his new ID, and she pushed him up against the nearest bulkhead, tossed that new ID to the floor. He guessed it needed wearing in anyway.

“Don’t think I’d answer to it if you did,” he replied, and they fucked right there against the wall, her legs wrapped tight around his waist. She laughed at him. When she called him Abraham, he answered to it. 

The name didn’t change him, and when all was said and done he felt like an ass for even thinking it would, for thinking it _could_. All it meant was no more skulking in the shadows, all it meant was contact lenses Jack got him somehow, lenses that meant he didn’t need the goggles all the damn time anymore, chafing, irritating. Jack gave him brown eyes and he guessed that was right but he couldn't remember, he'd had the eyeshine and the goggles so damn long. And frankly it turned Fry on when he screwed in the goggles, them and _only_ them. 

One day he held a knife to her throat and she looked at him levelly, stepped in closer, pushed against it, made him flinch from it first because she knew he wouldn’t kill her. She was sure of that because she was sure of him and more than that, she was sure of _her_ , the way she’d been since the night the sky was full of hunters. They were just like him, he thought, and in the end she hadn't been scared of them any more than she was scared of him now. 

He buried a knife in their next mark’s belly and she looked at him levelly, stepped in closer, stepped over the corpse and kissed him, hard. She’d lecture him on protocol later, how the job wasn't slam-sanctioned murder, and he’d just plain ignore her. That way they’d both feel better, but right then, as she kissed him as the blood spread round their boots, all that mattered was her hands on him. All that mattered was she’d lived and then she'd found him.

She wasn’t going to change him. He'd promised himself that, back on the ship when they'd left that world. 

She wasn't going to change him. It had just taken him a while to understand she wasn’t even trying to; she was setting him free, and for that he'd've followed her anywhere.


End file.
